(Nürnberg, Germany 21 Feb 2014) – HCC Embedded today announced that it has developed an advanced file system, custom designed for the needs of smart-energy and smart-meter applications. HCC’s approach maximizes the life of flash, significantly reduces power consumption, and provides a deterministic ‘emergency write’ function, which reduces cost by allowing the on-board capacitor to be as small as possible. Collectively the file-system features can result in savings of many ‘cents’ for each meter, a highly significant cost reduction in high volume manufacture.

The software is developed using high quality development methodology and is rigorously compliant with the MISRA C:2004 coding standard. The HCC ‘Smart-meter File System (SMFS) requires less than 15kB program memory and less than 1.5kB of RAM on most 32-bit MCUs.

Metering applications work with well-defined records that are more suited to a database approach. General-purpose file systems do not have any cyclic buffer logic for storing records and this adds complexity to applications. SMFS uses a structured database to reduce complexity of the application and improve the performance of the system in almost every way—speed, power consumption, and flash life.

Key features:

• Fail-safe data storage for guaranteed system recovery.
• Persistent data storage for 15 years or more.
• Minimal power consumption to preserve battery life.
• Minimum number of flash operations to preserve both the flash and the battery.
• Deterministic behavior in the event of unexpected reset.

SMFS is available immediately for a range of 16 and 32-bit MCUs and SOCs, and thanks to HCC’s Advanced Embedded Framework, can easily integrate with any RTOS, toolchain or development board.